Tunneling transport in d-wave superconductor-silicene junction

Abstract

We theoretically study the tunneling conductance of a normal/d-wave superconductor silicene junction using Blonder-Tinkham-Klapwijk (BTK) formalism. We discuss in detail how the conductances spectra are affected by inducing d-wave superconducting pairing symmetry in the buckled silicene. It is obtained that the amplitude of the spin/valley-dependent Andreev reflection and subgap conductance of the junction can be strongly modulated by the orientation angle of superconductive gap (β) and perpendicular electric field (EZ), suggesting that one may experimentally tune the transport properties of the junction through changing β and EZ. We demonstrate that the subgap conductance exhibits an oscillatory behavior as a function of the orientation angle of superconductive gap (β) with a period of π/2 and by increasing the insulating gap of silicene, the charge conductance oscillations suppress. Remarkably, due to the buckled structure of silicene at the maximum orientation angle of the d-wave superconducting β=π/4, we found a very distinct behavior from the graphene-based NS junction where the charge conductance is insensitive to the bias energy. In addition, the Andreev reflection and subgap conductance can be switched on and off by applying electric field. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd